I used to think my perfectionism made me good at my job. Turns out it was making me slow, exhausted, and avoidant. Sometimes perfectionism isn’t about high standards at all. Sometimes it’s about fear of judgment. Or, fear that if we don’t control every detail, something will fall apart, so we have to anticipate every possible outcome and try to solve for it in advance. (If you’ve ever rewritten a two-line email to your principal four times, or stayed up redoing a slide nobody else would...

Lesson planning is one of the most time-consuming parts of this job, and (infuriatingly) you're expected to do most of that incredibly important work off the clock. I think a lot of teachers feel like it SHOULD be faster and easier, especially if you've been teaching for a while. It's frustrating to spend soooo long trying to nail just one lesson out of the hundreds you'll teach this year. I'm talking about this with Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy on an upcoming episode of the Truth...

You've heard "activate prior knowledge" a million times. And, you're already good at it. You ask kids what they remember from yesterday, you do the KWL chart, you run the quick turn-and-talk. But there's a whole layer of behavioral science underneath that phrase that most teacher PD skips entirely. It's called priming, and it's happening in your classroom every minute of every day whether you plan it or not. Priming is when exposure to one thing changes how your brain processes the next...